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Comment by mafribe | Hacker News Reader

   What's Rust like in ...

Isn't that less a question of Rust (which due to its affine types, should be usable for generating code with predictable performance) but of compilers? It should be possible to write a Rust compiler that optimises for predictable performance at the cost of speed.

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That's a fair point.

I don't quite follow why speed needs to be sacrificed to get predictable performance though.

And I don't know about writing a (whole new?!) Rust compiler (!) - if the current Rust compiler wouldn't be a good fit for this purpose, well, I definitely don't have the resources to anything about that, considering the unbelievable amount of attention to detail and wrangling that's gone into getting rustc to where it is today.

Everything you say is true, but a very simple compiler with little/no optimisations should be quite easy to write. Indeed it is often coursework in undergraduate compilers courses (for source languages simpler than Rust). The main difficult would be the type-checker, but you could reuse the existing one, for it does not affect run-time performance.

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